Before reading any further, jot down on a piece of paper your definition of the term 'accelerated learning' (AL); even if you've never heard it before, have a go.

AL was came about in the 1970s at a time when there were lots of new scientific discoveries and we were starting to learn more about the human brain than we ever had done. It was an exciting time for anyone in education; suddenly people were starting to talk about the learner being more important than the trainer, that being active in and motivated by the experience people could learn faster, and that they way people were teaching/training was out of place with the way the brain works.

So where did it all begin? Georgi Lozanov was a Bulgarian medical doctor and professor of psychiatry who developed programmes that taught young children to read more quickly and have a better grasp of maths than their peers - not only that though, these children were retaining much more than with traditional methods. He called his method suggestopedia, and his results were validated by Bulgarian experts and a UNESCO team.

It was looking promising for Dr Lozanov, but Bulgaria was under communist rule and he was placed under house arrest and forbidden contact with foreigners so that they may keep secret their learning methods. However, some outside people had seen a little of his work, just enough to grasp the elements of his approach.

Since then science has been producing more and more evidence of how not only our brain works, but our nervous system, immune system, and psyche - and all these combined give learning facilitators great insight into how learning can be easier, enjoyable, and faster. Today people such as the UK's Colin Rose have pioneered learning systems that have been in use for over 20 years, along with Tony Buzan, Professor Howard Gardner, Gorden Dryden, Dr Jeanette Vos, Eric Jensen, Dr Carla Hannaford, and Paul Dennison (these are my favourites and they have all helped practitioners improve teaching/training methods).

This is all well and good, but I still haven't actually said what accelerated learning is! How did you get on with your definition? I'll let you in on a secret...there isn't actually a single definition for AL! It's more an umbrella term that covers myriad approaches to learning - some of these being Brain Gym, Brain Dominance Profiling, Multiple Intelligences, NLP, Emotional Intelligence, Left/Right brain, MindMaps, VAK, MindBody connection and many others.
As a practitioner of AL for the last 12 years I'd like to offer this: AL is simply about learning more in less time with enhanced knowledge retention and recall.

This can sound daunting to some people but it shouldn't, because designed correctly this type of learning is interactive, dynamic, fun, and relaxing. The learning happens naturally and (what seems to be) effortlessly.
Let me give you a couple of practical examples of AL at work.  A few years ago I worked with a group of trainers at British Aerospace who had some fairly heavy technical training to deliver. One man in particular had 22 diagrams on over-head projector acetates that he would overlay, one after the other, whilst explaining to a group of engineers how to assemble this particular engine. Well, it didn't surprise me when he said he "usually lost people during this" - it was pretty mind numbing stuff!

He wanted to a) shorten the session, and b) keep people focused. The first question I always ask is 'how can we involve the audience more?'. In this case we simply ditched the acetates and made each person become a component of the engine by standing in a certain formation, so it became like a human engine (he even asked us to make the appropriate noise - a good idea because it helped us recall the engine parts!).
Why is this accelerated learning? Because it took a few minutes to explain (rather than the 20 minutes it used to take), it involved all of us, and it was easy for us to remember the key concepts. AL comes into it's own when you need to get across a concept.

Another time, when I was working on a training programme at the CBI several years ago, the finance director was studying for his MBA. He approached me to ask how he could improve his note taking for revision purposes, as reading through pages and pages of words didn't seem to be helping. I immediately thought of Mind Maps (Tony Buzan); these work by mimicking the way the brain accesses and recalls information, i.e. branching out in three dimensions from a core (not left to right, top to bottom like written words).  There are specific rules to follow when plotting a Mind Map, but essentially you write the core topic in the centre of a piece of landscape paper, and then form major branches, followed by sub-branches as required. You make it bright, bold, colourful, and with pictures.
I gave him about half an hour's tuition, that's all, and was delighted when a few weeks later he came to tell me that during his exam as he got stuck on a question, he closed he eyes and pictured his Mind Map and he could literally "see the answer".

In part two of this article I'll be talking about why AL is essential in the current economic climate, and present you with the results of a case study that was carried out to show the difference between and AL and 'traditional' methods - you may be surprised what it revealed.